All Unitasker Wednesday posts are jokes — we don’t want you to buy these items, we want you to laugh at their ridiculousness. Enjoy!

When did knives become too difficult to use? When did crust become something you don’t eat? When was using your fingers or a chopstick ineffective for pinching two pieces of bread together? When did we become a people demanding the production of the Krustbuster?

Next thing you know, there will be a device made just to dispose of the sandwich-crust border! Actually, my favorite part of this device is its packaging, which promotes the Krustbuster’s “multi-uses”:

So! Many! Sandwiches! But how in the world do they use it on s’mores’ crunchy graham crackers?? Maybe stale graham crackers? Where is a YouTube video when you actually want one?

Wow. The easiest way to go crust-less is to cut the sandwich in half and eat from the middle to the crust. I’m not a fan of crust on sandwich bread, but that doesn’t mean I’m fool enough to buy one of these.

Sad to me that so many parents are needlessly removing the crust from their spoiled kids’ sammiches, either with or without useless gadgets like this. The crust, after all, is the most healthful part of the bread:

I wouldn’t buy it, but if you were a big fan of crustless tea sandwiches I can see how this gadget might help. You could remove the crust, make the sandwich, and then cut it into eighths. Not everyone has great knife skills.

What’s the filling on the sandwich on the left in the picture, do you think? To me it looks like sliced strawberries and yogurt, but that sounds like a terrible sandwich. The middle one is PB&J, and the one on the right looks like some sort of toasted tomato/cheese combo, but that one on the left is really confusing me.

@cv — We discussed that here in the offices, before the post went live. We think it’s either slices of strawberries in cream cheese OR long slices of pimento in a filling of some kind (mayo? cream cheese? velveeta?). The world may never know! 🙂

I don’t want one of these, but I do find it interesting that http://www.krustbuster.com describes the product as four devices in one: sandwich sealer, sandwich crust remover, sandwich container, and kitchen toy.

It does look like it kind of seals the sandwich edges, and that piques my interest a little bit because I have a 3-year-old who is not totally clear on the concept of sandwich-eating. He takes sandwiches apart and/or the filling falls out, so doesn’t understand how the best part of eating a sandwich is enjoying the tastes together.

BUT I am a firm believer in crusts and in a few months he will outgrow this problem so … no thank you. Whereas after pressing more tofu since your last post, I am beginning to seriously wish I had a tofu press 🙂

Don’t forget the stamps so you can “identify whats [sic] in your sandwich.” I’m sorry that hot dog sandwich recipe isn’t on there, but am I the only one who thinks the french toast recipe looks yummy? Mmmm….

I blame Smuckers Uncrustables for this do it yourself device!!! My mom is still laughing that I bought those at Costco once; “You spent $1.00 per peanut butter and Jelly sandwich and didn’t even get the crust!”

Somebody call the whaaaaambulance. If a kid “doesn’t like” crusts, who care? He should have to eat them just like I had to eat my vegetables growing up. Besides, he’ll grow up someday. It’s not as if anyone could find the crust to have an offensive taste; it’s just not sweet like the rest of the bread/sandwich.

@Sarah A hot dog sandwich is a sandwich served on a hot dog bun. It’s not particularly interesting, just a different shape.

Molly, I love those things. We called them mountain pie makers, and they are AWESOME. One of my favorite college memories is the time a bunch of my friends spent a weekend in a cabin with a fireplace and basically ate nothing but mountain pies for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. It was like a competition to see who could come up with the best mountain pie filling.

This is brilliant. I always hate removing the crust from sandwiches and bread. The crust may be healthy, but it has a very bland and unappealing taste. This is one unitasker I would very much buy, for the simple reason that it performs a task easily that I regularly do myself, but without mangling the piece of bread!

I have rarely met a sandwich that I haven’t un-crusted for myself or one of my sons- but I have NEVER thought… “Gee, why doesn’t someone invent a device that will do this for me?”. It’s one of the easiest things to do- I put the sandwich on a paper towel (the half size), cut the crust off with a serrated knife and throw the crusts away in the paper towel. Maybe my knife is super sharp? Or maybe my bread is easier to cut…

I too remember the metal contraption from the 70s like Molly. It produced round shapes like flying saucers. It had more uses though. You could use it over a fire, on a grill and we used in on our electric stove. We made grilled cheese round things with it. We never took it camping but could have and we ate the crusts but it could have been used for their removal too with out cooking. So the old fashioned version at least had more uses, but really not enough uses. My mom only rarely dug it out to use.

Ah, I too remember the Mountain Pie Makers. Do they still have them, or did potential lawsuits put them out of business along with all of my other childhood death defying toys & contraptions (“Warning: Placing food in this metal object & placing said metal object into roaring campfire will burn the roof of your mouth if you’re too dumb to let the flaming food cool off first. Bread, pie filling, and campfire sold separately.”)

About the crusts, my grandfather always told us when we were kids to “Eat your crusts. They’ll put hair on your chest.” I’m a girl. I asked him, “Why would I want hair on my chest?” He said growing hair on my chest would keep the boys away.

There are lots of those kind of things in Japan (where I live!), but the point isn’t to remove the crust (if you buy bread that is supposed to be used for making sandwiches in Japan, the chances are that there will be no crust to begin with!), but to kind of seal the edges of it, I guess so that you can carry it around without worrying about the filling of your sandwich leaking…

Still undoubtedly a unitasker in Japan, but I think that it’s not quite as ridiculous, as it would be quite difficult to make that kind of sandwich with a sealed edge (they are very popular over here!) if you didn’t have some kind of device for it.

Although, I personally would much prefer a normal sandwich with a crust.

“Sad to me that so many parents are needlessly removing the crust from their spoiled kids’ sammiches, either with or without useless gadgets like this. The crust, after all, is the most healthful part of the bread”
My kids aren’t spoiled, they just decided one day they hated crusts. Given that they often fight over who gets to have the last piece of broccoli, I pick my battles. But the gadget . . . I don’t see how this could possibly be a time-saver, since it takes seconds to use a knife (even a dull one) to remove the crust. Even if I had the counter space or cabinet space to store it.

Crusts are drier, harder to chew and have less sandwich filling in them. Many kids won’t eat them, as they actually are in touch with their taste pleasure centers instead of eating mechanically by habit or duty like adults do (and teach kids to).

And before SOME of you who have never dealt with this problem speak up, remember that sandwiches often end up in lunchboxes, where the kids choose what they eat and leave the rest. If you think this is important enough to force them to eat stale bread crusts at the end of the day, well, feel free to argue your point.

You waste less by trimming them neatly than the hatchet job the kids do avoiding the crust bit all around.

I never throw the crusts away – either I get a little snack or they go in the “everything soup” freezer container.

Oops, and addressing the “most healthful” issue. Unless I see a total chemical analysis of crust vs rest, I remain unconvinced. High heat also releases harmful chemicals, so locating one which is more healthful does not a conclusion make.

How can the nutritional value of the crust be any different to the rest of the slice. The dough doesn’t separate out into good outside, less good inside as it cooks. This is just a confidence trick told to children to save wasting some of the loaf, along the same lines as the ‘puts hair on your chest’ one, and you don’t believe that, do you?

Now I am a grown-up, if I am hungry I eat the whole lot, (usually by eating round the edge so the crust is gone first. That’s a throw back to childhood when I was made to eat the crusts, so I ate the nasty bit before the middle.) but as I get full I might choose to leave some of the crust. In the same way, sometimes I eat my pudding first!

When my kids were little, I told them that they didn’t have to eat the crust, but they had to remove it themselves. Usually they just cut the sandwich in half and eat it from the middle to the crust, as described by others above. Occasionally they cut the crust off.
I think my mom bought them a crust-removing device and it was used once and forgotten.
I find it interesting that my kids who won’t eat crust will eat buns, which are all crust. I don’t say that to my kids, though, for fear they will stop eating buns.

I remember taking a box lunch to school in first grade. Most of us got crust-trimmed sandwiches, and all — little liars that we were — insisted that we LIKED the crusts but our MOMS kept trimming them off.

BTW, if you go to jbox.com you can get devices like this one that will trim your sandwich into hearts, circles, triangles, or, God help us, Hello Kitty.

Okay, so if you bake a traditional Pullman loaf of bread, it is really very simple to “uncrust” the entire loaf of bread before it is sliced…. the royal road to true (and truly delicious) tea sandwiches….

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